Q: That's alright. Just sit up. Tell me about the
early coal operators and their perspective on their
position, on their struggle.
JJKA 0034
JT: Well, I think the coal operators' perspective in the
late 19, beginning in the late nineteenth century and
going down to the Great Depression. The perspective
was that they were involved in a War. They saw a
great conspiracy working against them. A conspiracy
of the United Mine Workers and of the coal operators
in Pennsylvania and Ohio. West Virginia coal had no
home market. And, so the coal operators of West
Virginia saw themselves in a desperate struggle,
because they felt that if they were organized by the
United Mine Workers, which they felt coal operators
in other states were trying to encourage, and, in fact,
they were trying to encourage. But, they felt if they
were organized, they couldn't continue to compete
with these coal producers in other states that were
nearer the markets.
JJKA 0108
So, I think, they convinced themselves, it was kind of
a paranoia really, but, they convinced themselves that
were in a struggle for survival. In this perspective of
a coal operator colored everything they did, and I
think it really effected a lot that happened in the
whole state during that period. That whole period
roughly 1897 to 1933. They were determined not to
have a Union, a coal miners Union, the United Mine
Workers, or any other Union and there were others
that tried to come in from time to time. They were
determined that they weren't going to have them, that
they couldn't have them. And, it became almost a
patriotic sort of thing and they convinced other people
who were not coal operators, other people in the
middle class in West Virginia, in both political
parties, that this was essential, that they could not
allow the United Mine Workers to operate in their
region, in West Virginia.
JJKA 0193
So, it colored a lot of things they did. It colored what
they did in their coal towns. They set up systems of
security that were extreme, systems that, you know as
we look back, we say "in America they had this sort
of thing where they had armed guards, they set-up
towers with machine guns on them." All of this, in
the name of this war that they were fighting and they
really convinced themselves. It was a war they were
in and it was a patriotic duty to do these kinds of
things.

Q: Tell me what it was that the Union
represented that was so threatening.
JJKA 0254
JT: Well, what the Union threat, as they saw it , was
that it was going to raise the cost of operation. They
felt they would have to pay higher wages to Union
workers, an element that they couldn't control would
come into the picture. The wanted order and this was
part of their way of, of seeing that there was order in
their operation. And, it was an economic thing. A
business consideration. They saw this as a potential
rise in cost of production, if they had to deal with,
with the Union. They saw themselves as having, as
being in, as being in a difficult situation, because they
had to ship to markets that were far from where they
produced. The other operators in Ohio and in
Pennsylvania, had short hauls to their markets. As a
matter of fact, though, the West Virginia operators
had advantages that the other operators didn't have.
In southern West Virginia, they produced a kind of
coal that was particularly valued in the, in the
production of metallurgic coal items and, so, really,
they had an advantage.
JJKA 0361
They, also, had an advantage in the way they
produced their coal. Producing it in the beginning,
mostly from drift mines, which were high on the
mountains, so they had the force of gravity working
for them, rather against them. They could, handling
the coal, using the force of gravity, actually, was
advantageous. In other, in Pennsylvania many of the
mines were mines that were deep underground and
they didn't have that, they had gravity working
against them. A lot of the West Virginia mines is drift
mines rather than shaft mines, an economic
advantage. Another economic advantage West
Virginia mines had was that they were located in a
place where they could take advantage of shipping to
the lake markets and shipping to the eastern markets.
And, shipping to the eastern markets, they also had
the advantage of gravity. Particularly after the
Virginian railroad came into southern West Virginia.
JJKA 0440
It was built as an all-gravity road. And, it would run
strictly by gravity down to Tidewater, where coal then
could be shipped to eastern ports. so, I think they had
economic advantages, despite the fact that they saw
themselves in this embattled position, distant from
markets, where they had to engage in this warfare,
really.

Q: Getting back to the company towns, tell,
describe to me the kinds of additional security
measures that they were taking, including the hiring
of constables in elections and, if you can, mention the
case of Justice Collin.
JJKA 0502
JT: Because of this conspiratorial situation that they
saw themselves in, this conspiracy operating against
them, operators in the other states and the United
Mine Workers joining against them in this destructive
conspiracy, they believed that it was necessary to, to
set up systems of local security that were, you know,
from our perspective today, rather amazing. They
used armed guards. They hired an organization, often
this was carried out by the Baldwin Felts Detective
Organization, which offered this service to the mine
operators. And, mine operators, like Justus Collins,
would, one of the first things Justus Collins would do
when he set-up an operation in an area, would be to
call the other coal operators together and say "we
have to organize to be sure that we are not going to
have Union organizers coming in here, we have to
organize, we have to hire Baldwin Felts, we have to
arm our camps."
JJKA 0595
In some cases this went so far as setting-up towers
with machine guns on them that could scan the whole
area with flood lights on them so they could be sure
nobody could sneak in at night. It became quite
elaborate, at times. And, moreover, they sought to
control the local government in McDowell County,
for example. As late as the 1930's, most of the
members of the County Court were coal operators.
And, of course, they could control the local situation.
They had a system of constables in many of the coal
counties where these constables, on election day,
would go about and hand-out the list of who you were
supposed to vote for. And, when the constable
handed it out, you were, the coal miner and others,
were expected to go vote for that list. And, this
system of constables, mine guards, of course, existed
for a long time, mostly down to the Depression.
Although, illegally, after about 1917, I think. The
system of constables, also, was illegal. It was driven
out of Logan County in the 1920's under the, when
Governor Conley was governor. Things got so bad
there with gambling and various forms of corruption
by the local sheriff's department and coal operators in
conjunction, that they cleaned out Logan County.
The Attorney General of the State, whose name was
Howard Lee, went in and, essentially took over the
operation of the sheriff's department. Got rid of all
the gambling casinos and did away with the
constables.

Q: Let me ask you how, getting to the end of this
Mine War Era, it seems the miners accomplished very
little and that the operators, did manage, through their
techniques, to maintain their position, keep their
competitive edge. It seems like they were
successful.
JJKA 0775
JT: Well, I think the coal operators were successful in
maintaining the control which they sought. The
system that Justice Collins advocated, worked. They
had the mine guards, they had the constables that
controlled the county courts, they even, to some
extent, controlled politics in the state. So, yes, I think
they, they succeeded, pretty much. They succeeded;
there were a few times when coal operators, when the
Union would have brief success, but, of course, they
also had the use of the injunction by the 1920's the
Supreme Court had kind of endorsed the idea of using
an injunction to keep labor organizers away from
properties and they could do that. And, in the 1920's
the State was kind of papered with injunctions and
this kept the Union out.

Q: Let me ask you another general question.
That is, you mentioned that you felt that coal, because
it was unregulated, that West Virginia had missed
several important opportunities to get a handle on
coal, to utilize it for the betterment of the State. It
missed those opportunities. Can you tell me about
that?
JJKA 0873
JT: There were, from time to time in the history of the
state since it was constituted, missed opportunities
when, I think, the state might have seized upon things
that came along. That would have, would have
improved the situation of this state, in the long run.
In the very beginning, and this didn't have a lot to do
with coal, but, there was an opportunity early on to
adapt a very progressive kind of educational system,
advocated by one Gordon Battelle. Failed to do that.
The state failed to adopt it and, I think, that was
unfortunate. That was one of those missed
opportunities. Early in the twentieth century, another
missed opportunity was a time when there was an
effort to bring about reform in the system of taxation
in the state which would had put taxes on coal, gas,
and other things that were moved from the soil of the
state.
JJKA 0953
Came very close, but a coalition of business and
agricultural interests banded together to defeat that
and that was another great missed opportunity, I
think. This was early in the twentieth century, so the
whole twentieth century, all that coal and the gas that
was being removed from the state, could have carried
a tax that would have rebounded to the benefit of the
citizens of the state. Because that reform failed, that
was never to be.

Q: OK. Let's stop. We just ran out of film.

THOMAS INTERVIEW, TAKE 2, CAMERA
312, SOUND 144.

Q: Could you tell me about safety in coal
mining? Tell me about the number of men who lost
their lives to coal.
JJKA 1027
JT: It was an extremely, coal mining was an
extremely dangerous occupation. extremely
dangerous. You know, coal miners like to gamble.
But, they faced the longest odds, not at the gaming
tables, but when they went into the mines. It was
extremely dangerous. We know the stories of the big
explosions and the mega deaths. Like Monongah,
1907, over 300 died. But, I think the fact that
sometimes gets lost is that there were many more who
died just everyday casual accidents. And a figure that
stuns me, is the fact that from 1897 to 1928, ten
thousand men died in West Virginia coal mines. Ten
thousand. In West Virginia, I'm not talking about the
country, I'm talking about West Virginia. That's a
stunning fact to me. Now, there were efforts from
time to time to do something about the dangers in the
coal mines, going back to the 1880's.
JJKA 1128
A system of mine inspectors was set-up, but it cost
money, of course, to run a state system of mine
inspectors. And, also, the coal operators were often
suspicious of mine inspectors. They thought they
could be Union Agents. It all fits into the
conspiratorial view that coal operators had. The
didn't like any outsiders coming into their operation
and telling them what to do and mine inspectors often
did. So, the state system was not a very effective
system. But, I think, it was a problem, not just in
West Virginia, but nationally and internationally.
There were problems in coal mining. The reasons for
these explosions were imperfectly understood. I think
they didn't understand well, that when they
mechanized mines, when they started using cutting
machines, it created more dust in the air and the dust,
itself, could be explosive.

Q: Alright. We have a battery.

THOMAS INTERVIEW, TAKE 3.

Q: Jerry, tell me, rather briefly, a few of the
reasons why coal mines became so unsafe and how
operators didn't recognize that.
JT: How they became?

Q: So unsafe. You said mechanization was one
of them and, then tell me the case of Justus Collins'
perspective on mine inspectors.
JJKA 1250
JT: Both the state of West Virginia and the Federal
Government, around 1907, at the time of the
Monongah explosion, began to investigate more
seriously than they had ever done before, just what
was causing the terrible explosions that Monongah is
such a tremendous symbol of. They discovered, for
one thing, that coal dust in the air with mines being
worked on more by machinery, there was much more
coal dust generated. So, it wasn't just a matter of
gaseous mines, they knew gaseous mines could
explode, but now they found out that, also, coal dust
in the air could be a source of explosions. But, there
were those who had conspiratorial views even of the
explosions. When they were investigating the causes
of the explosions in West Virginia, Justus Collins, one
of the leading southern West Virginia coal operators,
said that he believed that the United Mine Workers
was responsible, trying to reflect badly on the coal
operators by having their mines explode. He thought
that the United Mine Workers, or at least he said he
thought this, that the United Mine Workers actually
sent agents into the coal fields to, to cause these
explosions to occur.
JJKA 1359
And, he urged that investigations be undertaken of the
United Mine Workers, on this basis, that they were
actually sending agents out to blow-up the mines. I
think this is an excellent example of the extent to
which coal operators could become paranoid. And,
this whole competition that they were having with the
United Mine Workers and the coal operators of other
states.

Q: OK. Good. I think that does a nice number
on coal for us. Let's leap ahead into the 1920's.
World War I comes and goes, coal rises, Mine Wars
come, coal falls. And then, away from the mines, the
towns and farms in West Virginia, automobiles start
to appear, change starts to accelerate. Describe that
picture.
JJKA 1437
JT: In the 1920's, West Virginia was caught up in
some of the change that was taking place in the
country. It was a decade of great change. We tended
to think of the 1920's as an age of laissez faire
presidents and laissez faire governors and so on. But,
it actually was a decade of tremendous change. In
West Virginia, despite the fact that the coal industry
and agriculture had their downsides in the '20's, there
were things that were going on in which West
Virginia was really a part of the change. The coming
of the automobile. The State of West Virginia in the
1920'a spent over one hundred thousand, or a
hundred million dollars, over a hundred million
dollars.

Q: ?? The State of West Virginia.
JJKA 1509
JT: The State of West Virginia, in the 1920's, spent
over a hundred million dollars building roads in this
State. And, building roads in this State, was no easy
job. This was a tremendous project. A tremendous
undertaking and, it's interesting to read about in the
old reports, believe it or not, I have read some of the
old reports of how they went about this. It's pretty,
one of the really big projects in the history of the state,
the building of the roads in the State.

Q: What impact did it have?
JJKA 1553
JT: The building of the roads throughout the State of
West Virginia had tremendous impact on local
communities. I think it re-oriented, even the way
people lived and where people lived. People came
down from their mountain homes so they could be
closer to the roads. And, they, it really left a lot of
houses tumbling down and forgotten, back in the
mountains, because people wanted to get closer to the
highways which meant they were closer to
civilization. So in that way, it had a great impact.
The development of a bus system throughout the
State. There were tremendous number of bus lines, I
discovered, so that people could travel to places
where they had never been able to travel before in the
State. It, it made the population I think more
mobile.

Q: Could you stop for just a second. We have a
train.

THOMAS INTERVIEW, TAKE 4.

Q: Jerry, describe for me the impact of the
women's movement in the 1920's.
JJKA 1649
JT: Among the many unexplored topics in West
Virginia History of the 1920's, I think it's kind of a
terra?? incognito of the whole decade. But, the
women's movement, I think had a great impact on the
State. And, it seems to me, no coincidence, that
closely following upon women's right to vote, the
State enacted a number of laws that tended toward the
building of a welfare system in the State. They didn't
fund these, these things very well. But, they did such
things, for example, as permitting, enabling county
courts to establish mother's pensions. Now, not a lot
of County Courts did it, but some did. And, so you
have a system of mother's pensions where you didn't
have that before.

Q: What are mother's pensions?
JJKA 1732
JT: Mother's Pensions, apparently, were aid to
mothers with children, dependent mothers with
children. Kind of the early version of Aid to
Dependent Children. But, the pension, the payment
went from the County Court to the mother. And,
some counties funded this, not with big bucks, but
there was some funding of that. Also, this
Legislation, this new welfare oriented kind of
Legislation, seems to me to come in the wake of the
women's movement, provided for the establishment of
local welfare boards. County welfare boards. And,
so a lot of the counties in the State proceeded to set-up
county welfare boards. They weren't funded; this was
strictly voluntary, but the county welfare boards
could oversee the Mother's Pension Funds, the county
work farms or whatever kinds of institutions of that
sort that they had. In that time, of course, anything
that existed along welfare lines was strictly a county
operation. There was no State operation. But the
State did, another thing that they did, was to, to set-up
an organization, a State Organization, it was kind of a
forerunner of the Department of Welfare, whose focus
was on children. And, they hired a number of agents,
all women, to go out into the State to, to see to orphan
children. And, they began to, to deal with that. The
set-up some State institutions for both white children
and Black children, where they could put orphan
children.

Q: Let's get on to how life for Blacks in West
Virginia was impacted in the 1920's.
JJKA 1903
JT: For Blacks in West Virginia in the 1920's, I think,
there's a kind of a mixed situation. For one thing, I
think should be noted is that the situation for Blacks
in West Virginia was better than in some neighboring
states and, certainly, better than in Deep South.
Blacks could come to West Virginia in the coal fields,
they could get jobs in the mining camps. And, in the
coal mining counties, particularly in the southern part
of the state, where there were substantial numbers of
Blacks, they had a political impact. They were,
generally, Republican and the Republican Party saw
them as an important constituency and because of
their political impact, I think they had a certain pull
and they could get things. There was a State agency
which spoke to the needs of Blacks; there were state
institutions which were established which spoke to the
needs of the Black citizens of the State. The
educational system, though segregated, it was a
segregated system, but, apparently, the teachers were
hired in that system on the same basis as teachers
were hired in the white system.

[NOTHING ELSE TO END OF TAPE.]
[ABRUPT AND UNANNOUNCED END]
THOMAS INTERVIEW, TAKE 5, ROLL 313,
SOUND 145.
SECOND STICKS??

Q: Jerry, tell me about the downside of race
relations in West Virginia.
JT: The downside of race relations, and I think where
one has to be careful in claiming exceptionality for
West Virginia's race relations --

Q: Hold it, hold it for just a second. Just sit down
in front of the microphone. OK.
JJKB 0043
JT: The downside of race relations, and I think where
one has to be careful about claiming exceptionality
for race relations in West Virginia, is the fact that we
know the Ku Klux Klan was very active in the State
in the 1920's. We, also, know, if we look through the
newspapers of the time, that there are many incidents
of Black/White violence. So, I think we have to be
careful in going too far with this idea that West
Virginia was a kind of a special case of race
relations.

Q: In 1920's, agriculture comes under pressures,
as does coal. Describe that.
JJKB 0098
JT: I think in the 1920's both the coal industry and
agriculture, which were really the main occupations
of the people of the State, both of them were entering
into crisis stages. The coal industry was finding that
it needed fewer and fewer miners. There was a
tremendous decrease in the number of miners
employed by the coal industry in the State in the
1920's. Moreover, the coal industry throughout the
Nation was in decline because the demand that had
been generated in wartime, simply wasn't there in the
1920's. So, it was a crisis situation for coal.
Moreover, it was a crisis situation in agriculture in the
State. The largely, the subsistence agricultural
operation of the State, subsistence farms of the State,
were facing more and more of a struggle to make it.
They needed a certain amount of cash and was
becoming more and more difficult to get that
cash.
JJKB 0195
Now, some farmers had left their farms to go to work
in the mines. Some of them started working part-time
and then they would go to work full-time, which, of
course, left their wives and their children at home,
working the farms. But, those opportunities were in
decline as the number of miners employed by the
mines was in decline in the 1920's. Moreover,
agriculture was in a pinch in West Virginia because
of the increase in the property tax. The property tax
was the basis for local government in West Virginia
and before the Great Depression, before the New
Deal, the load of government, really, was on the local
level. And so the burden of taxation on the farmers
was growing tremendously in the '20's. And, their
sense of what was wrong was property taxes. And,
they saw the solution to their problems an end to that
heavy taxation.

Q: One of the pleasures that experiences the
Depression conditions, first in the State, are most
severely in the State, is Scotts Run. Tell me about
what Scotts Run was like. What kind of conditions
feed into to create that sort of abject poverty in West
Virginia.
JJKB 0317
JT: Scotts Run provides kind of a symbol for what
went wrong in West Virginia. At Scotts Run, early in
the twentieth century and around the time of World
War I, great numbers of people were brought in, both
people from the mountains, mountaineers, who came
down from their farms and people from many
different countries came into Scotts Run to mine the
coal at the various coal operations along Scotts Run.
In time, the Scotts Run companies found difficulty
marketing their coal. They found the crisis that, the
coal industry, the nation over was finding. They
found they had too many miners to mine the coal that
they could sell. And so you had a situation where
there were great numbers of people kind of captured
or stuck in an area. Quakers who came in in 1930
and 1931 and made a study of this situation, not only
in Scotts Run but in other places, came to the
conclusion that the problem was that there were too
many people mining coal. And, that tens of thousands
of miners were going to have to be put into something
else.
JJKB 0423
And, so arose the notion, I think, that a solution
would be to get the miners back to the land. Or, to
get the miners to farming, part-time, and mining,
part-time, or farming part-time and manufacturing,
part-time. They were, the Quakers, were trying to
deal with that situation and one of the things they
came up with was the Mountaineer, Craftsman
Cooperative, which produced furniture and, for a time
at least, was pretty successful in doing that. The
Quakers had some good ideas, but they didn't have a
lot of money to fund their operation. They came in on
an emergency basis. The got into feeding children on
Scotts Run and in other places in Appalachia. But,
their funds dried-up within a year. But, I think their
operations, what they did in Monongalia County and
Scotts Run and in other West Virginia and Kentucky
counties, provided a kind of a seed bed of ideas that
others drew upon during the Great Depression.

Q: Now, after the Church-sponsored missionary
efforts in West Virginia, the Quakers, the Methodists
and others, the Depression hits full scale across the
country and the New Deal is initiated. Describe to
me how Eleanor Roosevelt conceived, got connected
with, and then developed the idea of Arthurdale.
JJKB 0557
JT: Eleanor Roosevelt became very much interested
in West Virginia, and, particularly, in Scotts Run.
And, not long after the New Deal came into office and
her husband became President of the United States.
Eleanor made a trip to Scotts Run. What inspired her
to go there to begin with, I'm not, precisely, sure, but I
suspect that it was her knowledge of what the
Quakers had been doing there. She had contacts with
the Quakers, including a man named, Clyde Pickett,
who was the head of the Quaker Office in
Philadelphia, the American Friends Field Service
Operation. And, he may have been the key figure.
But, whatever the reason, Eleanor came.

Q: Let's pause for a second. Yea, let's just get
her there and get her. Tell me what she did. Tell me
what Eleanor did.
JJKB 0649
JT: Eleanor came to Scotts Run and was given a tour
of the area and she was shocked at what she saw. She
saw people living in conditions that she had never
imagined. She saw where most homes had no indoor
sanitary facilities, where garbage was out in the open.
She saw people who were hungry. People who were
unemployed. And, she also saw people who were
desperate and advocating extreme measures. She met
some Communists on Scotts Run. And, I think her
experience on Scotts Run convinced her that she had
to do something. And, she talked with people who
were involved there, such as Alice Davis, who was a
representative of the Quaker Operation there and who
became the head of the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration in Monongalia County.
JJKB 0742
And, she made other contacts there. And, out of all
this experience, I think she was convinced that what
needed to be done was to take these excess people off
the land or out of the mines at Scotts Run and find
some way to, to give them a livelihood where they
could work at something different and get out of this
completely dead-end situation that they were in. And,
out of that, I think, was born the idea of Arthurdale.
Let's take these people and let's put them on the land.
Let's let them be farmers. And, if they can't earn
enough by farming, let's bring in some manufacturing.
Why not have rural manufacturing along with rural
agriculture? And, that was the basic idea that
inspired Eleanor, I think, to begin the Arthurdale
Project.

Q: Was Eleanor, was Arthurdale
successful?
JT: Was Arthurdale successful? I think, the short
answer to that is "no, it wasn't successful, it didn't do
what they had set out to do." It did not create the kind
of situation that --

Q: That's unusable sound, right Pat? YEA.
THAT'S. OK. We're getting it. OK.
JJKB 0867
JT: Arthurdale didn't accomplish what it set out to
accomplish. It really didn't meet the goals that had
been set for it. It did not take this group of people and
set them down and give them a new livelihood in
which they had both agriculture and manufacturing.
The efforts to bring in manufacturing to Arthurdale,
failed. They were never successful in bringing in
manufacturing. What manufacturer wanted to go out
to a remote location like Arthurdale? It didn't make
economic sense. Moreover, the farmland at
Arthurdale turned out to be not very good land. They
had picked bad land. They did a lot of foolish things.
The houses that they brought into Arthurdale were
houses that were designed to be used on the beach for
summer homes. So, this didn't work out so well. Of
course, they did fix them up so that they were
suitable. They were also much smaller houses than
they should have been for the large families that were
being brought in from Scotts Run. But, I think the
bottom line in that, economically, it didn't work in the
long term. Of course, people moved to Arthurdale
and they had nice homes and many of them lived
there for many years and there are, probably, people
from Arthurdale today, who would say it was a
tremendous success. But, as a Government Project, it
didn't do what it set out to do and, by about 1946 the
Government was selling off the homes to private
individuals.

Q: OK. Let's cut. Can you place the, HEAR
THAT?

THOMAS INTERVIEW, TAKE 6, CAMERA
314, SOUND 146.

Q: Jerry, tell me about some of the other aspects
of Eleanor did in West Virginia. Just a second. OK.
Ready. OK.
JJKB 1022
JT: Eleanor Roosevelt had very wide interests in West
Virginia. It wasn't just in Scotts Run and Arthurdale,
she was interested, also, in Logan County and, in fact,
she would often send private checks, her own checks,
to things that she had a special interest in Scotts Run.
I've run across letters where people write her to thank,
"thank you for the check, we were able to help some
child who had, a bad disease, or something." They
were able to get a child into the hospital or, she sent
private money to help set up a medical clinic in
Logan County where Lenore Hickock had told her
that there were no decent hospitals or clinics for poor
people. So, Eleanor had, an interest beyond just
getting programs, government programs, going.
Apparently, she visited West Virginia quite often. I
ran across one story in a newspaper of --

Q: Let's just pause for a second. Let this truck
go by. Tell us when, Pat. Now? NO. OK? YEA,
WE CAN TRY IT.
JJKB 1139
JT: I ran across a story in a newspaper where Eleanor
was found out driving around in the State, an
unannounced visit, and the State Police stopped her
and said "Mrs. Roosevelt, can we help you?" and
Eleanor said "Oh, no, we're just driving around."
Apparently, she enjoyed just kind of driving around
the State and looking at different things. But, she
came to Scotts Run at least once a year and often
more than that. She had a very deep interest in the
State of West Virginia.

Q: Describe to me, in the midst of the Great
Depression, the impact, and maybe that's the best way
to say it, of the Jobs Program like the building of the
Hawk's Nest Tunnel and how that jobs creating
program went sour because of a number of factors.
What was Hawk's Nest?
JJKB 1228
JT: Well, Hawk's Nest was a private operation where
they were attempting to drive a tunnel through a
mountain, in order to, divert the flow of water in a
direction that would be useful for their turbines. And,
the difficulty was they were drilling in hard rock,
creating tremendous amounts of silica. They had no
provision for protecting the safety of the workers in
working this silica. So, the result was great numbers
of workers came down with silicosis and great
numbers of workers died. Many of them were
workers who had been brought in from outside the
State, many of them were Black workers. And, there
seems to have been a concerted effort to cover-up this
story and to keep it quiet about just what was going
on, in this operation. And, then it was very grim sort
of thing, great numbers of people died in it. It was
one of the great industrial disasters in the history of
this country.

Q: Was it an "act of God" or was it a
human-made tragedy?
JJKB 1346
JT: Was it an "act of God" or was it a human-made
tragedy what happened in Hawk's Nest? That's a
good question. And, I think I come down on the side
"this was not God's work." I think it was just these
companies involved in it thought they could get this
job done and get it quickly and they probably didn't
have a lot of regard for the people who were being
hurt by it.

Q: Tell me about another aspect of the New Deal
which was bringing in WPA writers to every state,
writing guides of the State, and the rather unique
turn.
JT: There's another question connected with Hawk's
Nest. The novel.

Q: I think that's sort of off the track, that that was
squelched, as well. Yea, tell me.
JJKB 1436
JT: In connection with the Hawk's Nest tragedy, there
was a novelist, Hubert Skidmore who wrote a novel
about it. And, as part of the covering-up of what
happened there, they covered-up this novel. They
squelched the novel. Kept it from being
published.

Q: How many years was it until it was
published?
JT: I don't know.

Q: OK. Can you tell me about the WPA writers
and that whole event, with a guide to the Mountain
State?
JJKB 1489
JT: One of the projects of the WPA, was this writers
project. This was a project put to work of writers and
teachers and so on. People who might not get jobs in
other kinds of WPA Projects, but were nevertheless
unemployed. One of the things that the Writers'
Project in West Virginia set out to do was, in
cooperation with the Writers' Projects all over the
country, was to write a guide to the Mountain State.
And, they probably never imagined what they were
getting into when they got into this because it became
a tremendous controversy with the Governor of the
State at the time whose name was Homer Rocky Holt.
Governor Holt found the writers' guide to be totally
unacceptable and he, even went so far as to write
letters to the President of the United States saying that
he could not accept this document, he couldn't accept
it because of what was in it and he couldn't accept it
because of some of the people who were working on
it. Chiefly, the chief villain, as he saw it, was a man
named Bruce Crawford. Now, Crawford did have a
radical background in the early '30's, which he didn't
deny. But, he was, simply, the director of this project
and the prose and all that was going into the project,
was being carefully screened by the National Writers'
Project.
JJKB 1617
And, looking at it these days, it's difficult to see why
the Governor got so upset about it. But, he was upset
about things, for example, there's a classic picture of a
coal miner washing himself over a tub, a grimy coal
miner, you know, he's washing himself. It's a great
shot. The Governor didn't want that picture in the
West Virginia Guide. He said "this would make them
think we don't have modern plumbing." There was
another picture that showed school children, really
robust, healthy-looking school children being taken to
school in the back of a truck. The Governor said "we
don't want this, this would make them think we don't
have school buses in West Virginia and we haul our
children to school like cattle." So, he had some
objections to the book that were, took a paranoia
thing. And, indeed, I think it kind of gets back to the
old fashioned paranoia that the coal industry had put
upon the State for a number of years because the big
issue for Holt was, he did not want ANY mention of
the struggle of labor in West Virginia.
JJKB 1720
There was a whole chapter on labor which he
wouldn't accept, in any way, shape, or form. He
fought tooth and nail to keep it out. He said "this was
too radical, you couldn't talk about Mother Jones, you
couldn't talk about the big strikes, you couldn't talk
about Weirton Steel and the strikes at Weirton Steel."
These things were unacceptable in a Book that was
supposed to be a guide for the Mountain State. He
couldn't buy the idea that labor had a history, too. He
didn't want any mention of labor editors, he said "they
were a bunch of scalawags and never did anything for
anybody, you shouldn't mention them." So, he had a
lot of prejudices that came out in his reaction to the
Guide and it was a terrible struggle.
JJKB 1781
In fact, the State Guide was never accepted, the West
Virginia Guide of the Mountain State was never
accepted by Homer Holt. In the end, they kind of
conspired -- Bruce Crawford, I think, and the
National Organization, conspired to keep this in cold
storage until Homer Holt was out of office. And, then
another Democrat of a different stripe, Matthew
Mansfield Neeley, was elected Governor in 1940.
Neeley was very favorable to the Book and he
ordered, in fact, that the chapter on labor be put back
in. Of course, Neeley was allied with the labor
movement in the State. It was politically important to
him. But, he was very favorable to the Guide and so,
finally, the Guide, as we know it today, was basically
what the Writer's Project wanted to produce.

Q: Let's go down to the whole big, general
picture. What do you think is, makes this such a
distinctive place? What do you think, you're a West
Virginian, what sort of attachment do you have to
West Virginia?
JJKB 1881
JT: What makes West Virginia a distinctive place and
what sort of attachment do I have with it? Well, that's
a tough question. And, the reason I'm interested in
these things, and the reason I've been talking to you
about them and have developed some knowledge
about them, is, probably, because I am a West
Virginian. I grew up in a coal mining town, a town
called Glen Rogers. So, some of what I know about it
is personal experience. But, I think West Virginia,
there is something special about West Virginia. West
Virginians have a special feeling for their State where
ever they go, I think they always feel that West
Virginia is "home." And, I think this may, the feeling
West Virginians have for their State, may be unusual.
I meet people from other states, and I don't think they
have quite the sense of, that West Virginians have
about their state. One may wonder why in the world,
with all the problems the State has had and all the
disasters we've suffered, why we would feel that way.
I don't know. Maybe because it has been such a
tough experience, we feel sympathetic with our home
state. But, there is something special about it.